Sunday, June 08, 2008

NASCAR 09 Available Tuesday

I personally am VERY excited about EA's newest installment of their NASCAR game. Why? NASCAR 09 is offering a unique feature in this year's game that has not been in a game not offered for PC. The "Paint Booth" feature will allow gamers to create their own exclusive paint scheme, upload it to EA, then import it into the console game. This is truly incredible because until now, if you wanted to customize a car (or character, or really anything) in a console game, you had to use their in-game editing tools, which were limited in their abilities at best. If you've ever tried to design a unique car in FORZA, you know what I mean. What EA did this time around is allow gamers like me the ability to use professional programs like Photoshop with infinite design possibilities from the internet (like sponsor logos, pictures, etc...) to design your car, then put it in your game.

I'm not sure whether I'm more excited to play the game, or just to design cars to show-off. I remember a few years ago Papyrus had a PC NASCAR game called Nascar Racing 03. You could customize the car paint-schemes in that game like you can in EA's NASCAR 09. I think I spent more time perfecting my designs for that game than I did actually playing it.

So I've already finished one design. You can pre-view it below. The first pic is the layout that would be designed in Photoshop (EA provides a template to make this easier). The second pic is the 3D view of the car.